CHAPTER VIII.
THE GOLDEN GARDENER .-- ITS NUTRIMENT In writing the first lines of this chapter I am reminded of the slaughter-pens of Chicago; of those horrible meat factories which in the course of the year cut up one million and eighty thousand bullocks and seventeen hundred thousand swine, which enter a train of machinery alive and issue transformed into cans of preserved meat, sausages, lard, and rolled hams.

I am reminded of these establishments because the beetle I am about to speak of will show us a compatible celerity of butchery.
In a spacious, glazed insectorium I have twenty-five Carabi aurati.

At present they are motionless, lying beneath a piece of board which I gave them for shelter.

Their bellies cooled by the sand, their backs warmed by the board, which is visited by the sun, they slumber and digest their food.

By good luck I chance upon a procession of pine-caterpillars, in process of descending from their tree in search of a spot suitable for burial, the prelude to the phase of the subterranean chrysalis.